In the ancient Roman world, mercy was viewed as a weakness.
“...in the pagan world, and especially among the philosophers, mercy was regarded as a character defect and pity as a pathological emotion: because mercy involves providing unearned help or relief, it is contrary to justice. As E. A. Judge explained, classical philosophers taught that “mercy indeed is not governed by reason at all,” and humans must learn “to curb the impulse”; “the cry of the undeserving for mercy” must go “unanswered.” Judge continued: “Pity was a defect of character unworthy of the wise and excusable only in those who have not yet grown up.”39
This was the moral climate in which Christianity taught that mercy is one of the primary virtues—that a merciful God requires humans to be merciful. Moreover, the corollary that because God loves humanity, Christians may not please God unless they love one another was even more incompatible with pagan convictions. But the truly revolutionary principle was that Christian love and charity must extend beyond the boundaries of family and even those of faith, to all in need.”
— The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion by Rodney Stark
Christianity softened Europeans. It made them gentler. It encouraged kindness and humility. Confessing one’s sins and learning from past mistakes transformed individuals, and slowly—very slowly at times—transformed Europe as a whole.1
How can a people improve if they are not willing to admit to their mistakes and learn from their past? Confession became the strength of the west.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the middle and far east began to adopt western values; then western academics began to pooh-pooh the west and praise other cultures. This led to many unintended harmful effects—one of which was the rise of radical Islam.
In the Islamic world confession is regarded as a weakness. Progress is slow when you do not have the humility to admit you were wrong. (And it is even slower when you blame others for all your problems. See "Explained: The Facial Scar Test (Social Experiment)" on Triggernometry)
If Europe is not careful it will be conquered again.
1. It caused Europe to advance more than any other civilisation. Not only were Europeans learning from their past mistakes, they were also learning from other civilisations.
“Eventually, the Western world would overtake the Middle Eastern and North African countries, both militarily and in terms of science and technology. But now the Islamic countries were by no means as receptive to the cultural advances made in the Western countries as the West had once been when the countries of the Middle East and North Africa were ascendant—or as the Islamic world itself had once been receptive to absorbing cultural advances from other societies.
This mutual receptivity to each other’s culture in the Middle Ages is now very much part of a long gone past. One revealing sign of today’s lack of cultural receptivity to Western culture in the Middle East is that in today’s Arab world—about 300 million people in more than 20 countries23—the number of books translated from other languages has been just one-fifth of the number translated by Greece alone, for a population of 11 million people.
Over a five-year period, a United Nations study showed that the number of books translated in the Arab world was less than one book for every million Arabs, while in Hungary there were 519 books translated for every million people, and in Spain 920 books per million people.24 Put differently, Spain translates more books into Spanish annually than the Arabs have translated into Arabic in a thousand years.25 This too was a pattern very different from the Islamic world of earlier centuries. Even the philosophy of ancient Greece once reached Western Europe in Arabic translations, which were in turn re-translated in Spain into Latin or into the vernacular languages of Western Europe.26
Cultural isolation can have effects very similar to the effects of geographic isolation, making it harder for individuals, groups, nations or whole civilizations to keep up with the advances of others. China’s decline from world leadership in many fields was likewise marked by resistance to learning from others. Early in the fifteenth century, the government of China imposed severe restrictions on contacts with the outside world, destroying the large ships in which a Chinese admiral had made voyages of exploration covering longer distances than Columbus’ much smaller ships. Such voyages were now not only forbidden but the building of ships capable of making such voyages was banned, and records of earlier voyages to what were regarded as the lands of foreign barbarians were destroyed. A twenty-first century American scientist assessed China’s position as of the time this fateful decision was made:
Before the decision, China had a fleet of ocean-going ships bigger and more capable than any European ships. China was roughly level with Europe in scientific knowledge and far ahead in the technologies of printing, navigation, and rocketry. As a consequence of the decision, China fell disastrously behind in science and technology, and is only catching up now after six hundred years.27
In the eighteenth century, when King George III sent gifts to the emperor of China that included various devices showing technological advances in the West, the emperor of China replied that there was nothing China lacked. He said: “We have never set much store on strange or ingenious objects, nor do we need any more of your country’s manufactures.”28 A rejection of advances from another culture could hardly have been more explicit—or more catastrophic, as China became ever more vulnerable to Western imperialism as the technological gap between the two civilizations widened.
Since no given culture is better in all things, much less for all time, a lack of receptivity to the cultural advances made by others is a self-imposed isolation that can be as damaging as isolation imposed by geography.”
— Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell